Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Almost Invisible Bokeh

In photography, bokeh (BOH-kə, Japanese: [boke]) is the blur, or the aesthetic quality of the blur, in out-of-focus areas of an image, or "the way the lens renders out-of-focus points of light." Differences in lens aberrations and aperture shape cause some lens designs to blur the image in a way that is pleasing to the eye, while others produce blurring that is unpleasant or distracting—"good" and "bad" bokeh, respectively. Bokeh occurs for parts of the scene that lie outside the depth of field. Photographers sometimes deliberately use a shallow focus technique to create images with prominent out-of-focus regions.

Even if a camera doesn’t take its picture
the wild flower is still out there in the wilderness
or turning a parking lot into wilderness
just by being a flower and just by being wild
and growing up through a crack in the parking lot.

Bokeh is light in the out-of-focus background
of a photograph, a kind of kaleidoscope
caused by the lens aperture and lens elements,
sometimes subtle, sometimes garish, kind of random
but always a construct of lens technology.

Bokeh is not real the way a wild flower is real.

I’ve always tried to be aware of depth-of-field.

I’ve always liked almost invisible bokeh.

The technology construct I want to create
is an image of wilderness, a flower, somewhere,
creating wilderness just by being wild there.